One of the most influential literary critical movements of the 20th century. Speaking very generally, Russian Formalism as a critical movement was interested in identifying the specific quality of language use that separated the literary text from the non-literary text. Their approach was scientific inasmuch as they thought it was possible to establish what it is precisely that distinguishes ordinary usages of language from the poetic. Unlike the later post-structuralists, the Russian Formalists treated poetry as an autonomous form of discourse that was distinct from all other forms of discourse. They referred to this difference in qualitative terms as literaturnost (literariness) and sought to quantify (i.e. formalize) it by means of their theory of ostranenie (estrangement), which simply put is the process of making the already familiar seem unfamiliar or strange, thereby awakening in us a heightened state of perception.

1. [8:49 AM, 12/28/2018] : Russian Formalism
One of the most influential literary critical movements of the 20th century. Speaking very
generally, Russian Formalism as a critical movement was interested in identifying the specific
quality of language use that separated the literary text from the non-literary text. Their
approach was scientific inasmuch as they thought it was possible to establish what it is precisely
that distinguishes ordinary usages of language from the poetic. Unlike the later post-
structuralists, the Russian Formalists treated poetry as an autonomous form of discourse that
was distinct from all other forms of discourse. They referred to this difference in qualitative
terms as literaturnost (literariness) and sought to quantify (i.e. formalize) it by means of their
theory of ostranenie (estrangement), which simply put is the process of making the already
familiar seem unfamiliar or strange, thereby awakening in us a heightened state of perception.
Russian Formalism is a generic term that covers the work of at least two major groups of
researchers based in Russia in the early part of the 20th century. The first group, based in St
Petersburg, was known by the acronym Opoyaz (Obschevesto po izucheniyu poeticheskogo
yazyka (Society for the Study of Poetic Language). Formed in 1916 by a small gathering of
students and professors working in language studies, it was chaired by the poet Osip Brik. The
original membership included Victor Shklovsky, Boris Eichenbaum, and Roman Jakobson. The
group folded in 1923, not the least because many of its core members fled into exile to escape
either the First World War or the Russian Revolution or both. The remnants of this group
merged with the second of Russian Formalism's constitutive groups, namely the Moscow
Linguistic Circle founded by an Opoyaz exile Roman Jakobson. Established for the purpose of
investigating the poetic function of language, its membership included such figures as Victor
Shklovsky and Yuri Tynyanov, who would both play a major part in advancing the theoretical
development of Russian Formalism. The group sought to connect poetics and linguistics so as to
show that you could not properly understand one in the absence of the other.
[8:51 AM, 12/28/2018] : deconstruction
A reading strategy developed by French philosopher Jacques Derrida whose essential gesture is
to demonstrate that every philosophical position, irrespective of how coherent it seems on the
surface, contains within it the means of its own self-undermining. Adapting the word from
Martin Heidegger's terms ‘Destruktion’ (destruction) and ‘Abbau’ (unbuilding), Derrida himself
describes it as a double gesture—the first move consists in reversing the hierarchy of a
particular philosophical opposition, while the second move amounts to a displacement of the
very systemin which the hierarchy operates. Derrida's work is often described as a critique of
the philosophy of presence because he destabilizes the opposition between presence and
absence, particularly with regard to the sign, which as Derrida explains in his account of
différance is always the present mark of an absence. Thus, as Jonathon Culler explains in his
seminal account of Derrida's thought and its influence, On Deconstruction (1982), it
undermines both the philosophy it asserts and the hierarchical oppositions upon which it relies.
As a reading strategy, deconstruction is particularly interested in identifying those aspects of a

2. concept or text whose peculiar state of being is to be undecided, neither this thing nor that
thing and not nothing either. His main example of this is the sign: the sign as sign is a sign of
something else, thus it is most fully itself when it is perceived as something else, but to remain
a sign it must also continue to be perceived as different from the thing it represents.
[8:53 AM, 12/28/2018] : postmodernism
A highly contested term used to signify a critical distance from modernism. Since it first came to
prominence in the mid 1970s, it has given rise to a vast body of literature in virtually every
discipline in the humanities and social sciences. Broadly speaking, though, it has been used in
three main ways:
(i) to name the present historical period;
(ii) to name a specific style in art and architecture;
(iii) to name a point of rupture or disjuncture in epistemology (for this reason it is often,
mistakenly, equated with poststructuralism and deconstruction). Attempts have been made to
standardize usage so that when the historical period is intended the term ‘postmodernity’ is
used, whereas if it is the aesthetic dimension that is at issue the term ‘postmodernism’ is used,
with the term ‘postmodern’ being reserved for epistemological references. Pedagogically useful
as this standardization of terminology is, the uptake of it is very far from universal.
In The Origins of Postmodernity (1998), Perry Anderson traces the first appearance of the
notion of postmodernism to the work of the literary critic Frederico de Onís, who used the
word ‘postmodernismo’ (in a foreword to a collection of contemporary Hispanophone poetry
he edited in 1934) to describe what he saw as a short-lived reactionary reflux within modernism
itself (i.e. precisely the opposite meaning to the one it would subsequently attain). Although it
gained widespread usage in Spanish and Portuguese criticism, both in Europe and Latin
America, it didn't pass into the Anglophone world until 1954, when the great English historian
Arnold Toynbee used it in an essentially negative way in the eighth volume of his A Study of
History to name the period beginning with the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1). However,
Toynbee's deployment of the term didn't catch on. It was, rather, the contemporaneous usage
of the term—initially only in private correspondence—by the ‘Black Mountain Poets’ Charles
Olson and Robert Creeley, who were the first to use it in a sense consistent with how the term
is understood today, that was to prove influential.
Olson and Creeley used the term ‘post-modern’ to describe both a shift in history and a specific
poetic project they developed in relation to that shift. But neither poet produced a durable
doctrine and the term fell into disuse again, only to be picked up a few years later at the dawn
of the 1960s by two scions of the New York Left, C. Wright Mills and Irving Howe. If in the hands
of Olson and Creeley the term postmodern had acquired a certain affirmative meaning, Mills
and Howe quickly restored its pejorative sense: they mobilized the term to describe a general
slackening of commitment to the political ideals embodied in the notions of communism and

3. socialism. At the end of the 1960s, its meaning was once more reversed by the literary critic
Leslie Fiedler who used it in a CIA-sponsored conference to celebrate the emergence of a new
‘youth-culture’ sensibility prioritizing personal expression and civil rights over work and th…
[8:54 AM, 12/28/2018]: Postcolonial Studies
A loosely-applied rubric for a large variety of work (creative and critical) across a range of
disciplines—particularly anthropology, history, and literary studies—with a shared interest in
the effects of colonization on the cultures of both the colonizers and the colonized. The leading
theorists in the field are Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and Edward Said. The field is large
enough for there to be several different sub-fields operating under its umbrella such as feminist
postcolonial studies and Queer Theory and postcolonial studies.
The origins of Postcolonial Studies are predominantly Anglophone, but a comparative
dimension has blossomed in the past two decades so that there are now substantial
Francophone, Lusophone, Germanophone, and Hispanophone (as well as many other language
groups) bodies of work in the area as well. The term was originally used by historians and
economists in hyphenated form (‘post-colonialism’) to describe the political and economic
situation of nations following decolonization, thus it had a specific historical point of reference.
However, it is in literary studies rather than history that the term has put down its deepest
roots, becoming in the process one of the most important intellectual movements in the entire
discipline, easily outpacing deconstruction and New Historicismwhose central tenets it has in
any case absorbed. Postcolonial Studies offers itself as a radical alternative to the bland and
ideologically naive Commonwealth Literatures project.
Literary studies has deleted the hyphen and with it the precision of reference it had in history,
thus allowing the term to encompass the analysis of virtually any aspect of colonization, from
the Early Modern or pre-colonial period of European exploration of the globe up to the present
day. The deleting of the hyphen should be regarded as an essentially polemic gesture
problematizing the very idea that colonialismis something that belongs safely in the past.
Indeed, there are many who would argue that viewed globally we are very far from being
postcolonial inasmuch that there are still many countries where the institutions, practices, and
power relations of colonization are still very much present (from the perspective of indigenous
peoples, this is true of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the US, to name only the most
obvious). Similarly, there are those who observe that, even where the colonizers have
departed, their models of governance remain so that a situation of neo-colonialism obtains
(here one might point to Israel and Palestine, whose recent history offers an even more
complex case of the persistence of colonization).
It is difficult to generalize about a field of study as broad as Postcolonial Studies, but it can be
observed that (i) it takes an anti-essentialist approach to identity (though it will allow the
necessity for strategic essentialism); (ii) it privileges difference over sameness (but

4. acknowledges that difference is not without its ambivalence); (iii) its political outlook is pluralist
and…
[8:55 AM, 12/28/2018] : rhetoric
The art of persuasive speaking and writing. It has been the subject of scholarly study since at
least the 4th century bc. It was a central component of Classical learning alongside logic and
grammar in both Athens and Rome, where it was divided into three categories: judicial,
deliberative, and epideictic. While Classicalscholars considered rhetorical skill essential to the
good conduct of both politics and philosophy, and as a consequence eminent scholars of the
time like Aristotle wrote treatises on the subject, over time, but especially in the Romantic
period, rhetoric has come under suspicion for emphasizing persuasiveness over truthfulness.
Rhetoric in some contexts, particularly the political arena, has become a codeword for empty or
insubstantial discourse. In literary studies, rhetoric is treated as a sub-category of style.
[8:56 AM, 12/28/2018]: philology
A theory of language development which traces the ‘family tree’ of modern natural languages
like English, French, and German back to their historical origins. The central point of interest of
such research is to show the common ancestry of words dispersed across several languages.
Although a highly distinguished philologist himself, Ferdinand de Saussure inaugurated the
semiotic revolution by arguing against this account of the history of language.
[8:56 AM, 12/28/2018]: ostranenie
(defamiliarization or
estrangement)
A central concept in Russian Formalism's attempt to describe and define what constitutes
literaturnost (literariness). A neologism, it implies two kinds of actions: making strange, and
pushing aside. Consistent with this double meaning, the concept refers to the techniques
writers use to transform ordinary language into poetic language, which for the Russian
Formalists is language which induces a heightened state of perception. Habit, according to the
Russian Formalists, is the enemy of art, therefore to produce art the writer has to force the
reader outside of the usual patterns of perception by making the familiar appear strange or
different. The principal theorist of this concept, Victor Shklovsky, uses a famous passage in
Tolstoy's War and Peace (1869), where an opera is described as ‘painted cardboard and oddly
dressed men and women who moved, spoke and sang strangely in a patch of blazing light’ to
exemplify this concept. Basically what Tolstoy does, according to Shklovsky in Theory of Prose
(1990), is view things out of context, or to put it another way he fails to see the thing that
makes the actions he describes either meaningful or coherent and in this way he defamiliarizes
them. In The Prison-House of Language (1972), Fredric Jameson enumerates three advantages
of the concept of ostranenie: firstly, it enables literary theory itself to come into being by
providing a way of distinguishing its object—namely, poetic language; secondly, it enables a

5. hierarchy to be established within works and between works (i.e. more or less defamiliarizing);
thirdly, it generates a new way of thinking literary history in terms of ruptures and breaks
rather than continuities and influences. The problem with this concept, however, is that it is
psychological rather than purely textual, inasmuch as it is premised on the deadened senses of
the reader being awakened by clever writing rather than something specific to the writing itself.
Obviously, too, this process suffers from the logic of diminishing returns—what was shocking
yesterday is all too familiar today, thus demanding an ever greater level of shock to achieve a
decreasingly small level of shock value (this, as many commentators have observed, is the
problem contemporary non-representational art also faces). See also cognitive estrangement;
estrangement-effect.
Further Reading:
T. Bennett, Formalism and Marxism (1979).
V. Erlich Russian Formalism: History—Doctrine (1955).
[8:57 AM, 12/28/2018]: metafiction
Fiction that draws attention to and directly comments upon its status as fiction. Most often this
takes the form of an intrusion of the ‘author’ into the work. One of the earliest and most
celebrated cases of metafiction is Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1760–7), which has the
author commenting frequently on his failure to get on with telling the story. But it can also take
the form of a work of fiction about either the reading or writing of fiction, as one finds (again
quite famously) in Italo Calvino's Se una notte d'inverno un viaggatore (1979), translated as If
on a Winter's Night a Traveller (1981). The device is more common in late 20th-century fiction
writing than it is in earlier periods and for this reason is often associated with postmodernism,
although there is no direct correlation between the two. The device can also be witnessed in
film and television.
Further Reading:
P. Waugh Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (1988).
[8:58 AM, 12/28/2018]: myth criticism
The study of both myths as literature and literature as myths—in the former case, myths are
read for their own specific literary merit and as historical precursors to later literary texts
(Sophocles' trilogy of plays surrounding the myth of Oedipus would be one example); in the
latter case, which has been the more influential of the two approaches, literary texts are read
as creative reworkings of myths. A number of prominent scholars have operated in this field:
the most notable are Mircea Eliade, Leslie Fiedler, Northrop Frye, René Girard, Carl Jung, G.
Wilson Knight, and Paul Ricoeur.
[8:58 AM, 12/28/2018]: New Criticism

6. A mode of literary analysis that developed in the southern US in the 1930s and 1940s and
became the dominant way of reading and thinking about literature in the American academy
until the advent of structuralism in the 1960s.
New Criticismtreats the literary work of art as a stand-alone, self-sufficient object that can only
be properly appreciated in isolation. Careful attention to the specificity of language use, a
process usually referred to as ‘close reading’, should tell the reader everything they need to
know about a text. The New Critics regarded every text (providing it was of a sufficiently high
standard to be deemed literary in the first place) as singular and ineffable, its meaning unique
and incapable of being expressed by any other means. For this reason New Critics prized and all
but insisted on ‘difficulty’ with regard to language use (a preference which would later earn
them the charge of elitism), making it an essential cornerstone in their attempt to define the
‘good’ literary object. By ‘difficulty’ the New Critics essentially meant polysemy (as the
structuralists would subsequently call it) or multiple meanings. Like the Russian Formalists
before them, and with a similar zeal for the technical side of writing, the New Critics wanted to
distinguish literature from non-literature in purely formal terms, which is to say purely on the
basis of the language use.
The New Critics were inspired by I. A. Richards' famous experiment with Cambridge students in
which he gave them poems to analyse but told them neither the title nor the author of the
pieces selected and interrogated their responses, finding them wanting in both sensitivity and
skill. The results of this experiment, written up in Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary
Judgement (1929), struck a chord with the New Critics who also thought that literary studies
needed to be taught differently, with more rigour than it had been in the past. New Criticism's
immense influence in North America, which lasted well into the 1980s, stems from the fact that
it paid serious attention to the problem of how to teach literature. In contrast to Practical
Criticism, which was very much centred around F. R. Leavis in Cambridge, New Criticismhad
several focal points—the key names in the field were: John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Cleanth
Brooks, R. P. Blackmur, W. K. Wimsatt, and Monroe Beardsley.
Further Reading:
T. Eagleton Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983).
[8:59 AM, 12/28/2018] : affective fallacy
A core idea of New Criticism. In a famous paper, entitled ‘The Affective Fallacy’ (1954), W. K.
Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, argue that the way a work affects its reader—whether it
makes us laugh, cry, bored, etc.—is not a valid source of critical judgement about a text's
relative worth as literature. Rather one must concentrate on its formal properties because
these and these alone are sufficient to distinguish good literature from bad. See also intentional
fallacy.
[8:59 AM, 12/28/2018] : intentional fallacy

7. A core idea of New Criticism. In a famous paper, entitled ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ (1954), W. K.
Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley argue that the author's intentions—that is, the vision the
author has of what they are trying to achieve in a particular work—is not a valid source of
critical judgement about a text's relative worth as literature. Crudely put, the fact that an
author thought they were writing the great realist of novel of their time is not sufficient to
make it so. By the same token, just because they failed to realise their intention to write a great
realist novel, that is no reason to disregard the work's other potential merits. Rather one must
concentrate on its formal properties because these and these alone are sufficient to distinguish
good literature from bad. See also affective fallacy.
[9:00 AM, 12/28/2018] : semiotics
The science of signs, as one of the founders of the field Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure
famously put it. There are two main schools of semiotics, Saussurean and Peircean, the latter
referring to the work of American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. The two
semiotic models, which were constructed independently of one another, differ in one
important respect: whereas Saussure's model of the sign is binary, Peirce's is triple. As a result
there has been little cross-fertilization between the two schools of thought. Saussure's key
insight, on which semiotics as a whole is built, is that the sound of a word is arbitrary with
respect to both its meaning and the thing to which it ultimately refers: there is no intrinsic
reason, for example, that a cow should be called a ‘cow’ and that the word should be sounded
in the way it is (that different languages have different words for the same thing may be taken
as proof of this latter point). On Saussure's view of things, the word ‘cow’ is more usefully
understood as a sign consisting of a signifier (the sound of the word) and a signified (the
concept we associate with that sound) and he extends this idea to the whole of language. More
than five decades after Saussure died, in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly (but not exclusively)
in France, linguists, literary theorists, cultural critics, and psychoanalysts, like Roland Barthes,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Christian Metz, and Jacques Lacan, began to experiment with Saussure's
notion of the sign and found that it could be extended to a great range of meaning-making
activities, including the non-linguistic realms of everyday life. This led to a veritable explosion of
interest in semiotics and for a number of years it was the dominant mode of analysis in the
humanities, particularly in Cultural Studies which saw semiotics as a means of theorizing how
ideology works. The pioneer in this respect was Roland Barthes, whose work on myth, showed
that even the most ordinary of objects, such as soap bubbles, convey significance beyond mere
utility (they can be a sign of purity, joy, cleanliness, childhood fun, and so on). As critics have
since pointed out, however, the price of this has been to treat every cultural activity as being
‘like a language’ and while this has been a powerfully effective model to follow it does have
drawbacks, inasmuch that not every cultural activity performs like a language. Since its heyday
in the 1960s, semiotics has become a specialist and highly sophisticated area of study which has
found a new audience amongst artificial intelligence researchers.
Further Reading:

8. J. Culler The Pursuit of Signs (1981).
U. Eco A Theory of Semiotics (1978).
W. Nöth Handbook of Semiotics (1990).
H. Ruthrof Pandora and Occam: On the Limits of Language and Literature (1992).
[9:00 AM, 12/28/2018] : binary opposition
A pair of terms that although opposed to one another are necessarily bound together as each
other's condition of possibility. Common examples of binary oppositions include: male/female,
nature/culture, hot/cold, gay/straight, signifier/signified and so on. Structuralism is predicated
on binary oppositions to the extent that its basic account of meaning is that something means
what it does by virtue of what it does not mean. Post-structuralism, and more especially,
deconstruction, arose as a challenge to the absolute nature of these oppositions.
[9:01 AM, 12/28/2018]: psychoanalytic criticism
The application of psychoanalysis to the understanding of cultural texts, particularly literary and
filmic texts. The originator of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, was fascinated by cultural texts
and made extensive references to them throughout his writings. Indeed, one might argue that
the foundational concept of the Oedipal complex is a product of Freud's interest in literature,
inasmuch that he speculates that Sophocles' play still has a hold on us some 2,500 years after it
is written because it dramatizes a universal experience. But Freud's most important thoughts
on the subject are to be found in two short essays, one on daydreams, the other on the notion
of the uncanny. In the first essay, ‘Der Dichter und das Phantasieren’ (1908), translated as
‘Creative Writers and Day-dreaming’ (1959), Freud argued that creative writing is a form of play
in which the writer creates a fantasy world that he or she takes seriously. The artistry of writing
lies in disguising, or better yet sublimating the libidinal dimensions of the fantasy world so that
readers will not be put off or embarrassed by it. In the second essay, ‘Das Unheimliche’ (1919),
translated as ‘The Uncanny’ (1955), Freud argued that literature's ability to unsettle us stems
from the way it reminds readers of their own traumatic, but unconscious events of childhood.
In this way, Freud laid out the two main pathways that psychoanalytic criticismhas followed
since: on the one hand, it has tried to use the author's life to understand their work, to see their
creations as the product of unconscious desires; while on the other hand, it has tried to
understand the effect creative works have by discerning in them repetitions of common
symptoms and neuroses that all readers can identify with. In both cases, then, the creative
work is apprehended as the representation of an unconscious wish, either the author's or the
reader's. The body of research in this field is immense and includes many of the leading names
in critical theory. Currently, the most prominent theorist in the field is Slavoj Žižek, but one
must also mention the challenge to psychoanalysis posed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari—
they do not reject psychoanalysis as many people think, but they do dispute the core idea of

9. psychoanalytic criticismthat all texts are so many rehearsals of unconscious fantasies. They
argue that texts are better seen as machines that carry out essential psychic work.
Further Reading:
E. Wright Psychoanalytic Criticism(1984).
[9:01 AM, 12/28/2018]: Reception Theory
(Wirkungstheorie)
German literary theorist Wolfgang Iser's term for his theory of the reader's construction of
texts. As Iser points out in his seminal work, Der Akt des Lesens: Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung
(1976), translated as The Act of Reading (1978), Reception Theory is interested in trying to
understand the actual process of reading itself, in contrast to Jauss's Reception Aesthetics,
which is interested in how existing texts are read and responded to. Its key ontological
assumption is that the text does not properly exist until it is read, which is to say it exists only in
the moment of reading. It is this productive moment that Reception Theory tries to understand
and articulate by drawing on and adapting the conceptual resources of phenomenology. Its key
question is: how and under what conditions is a text meaningful to a reader? Iser's answer is
that as readers we passively synthesize images on the basis of what we read—this means we
form images in our minds as they come to us, not as a deliberate, intentional, or conscious act.
We constantly adjust these images as new information comes to hand. In doing so, we must
push to the background our own thoughts and memories and thus allow what we are reading
to occupy the foreground. This process has the effect of alienating our own thoughts, thereby
putting them into a fresh perspective. According to Iser, then, this is what makes reading
‘improving’ in a moral and ethical sense. It is worth adding the following caution:
Wirkungstheorie is sometimes translated as reader-response theory (indeed, Iser himself
suggests response as the most viable translation of Wirkung), but in spite of similarities it is not
the same thing. See also reader-response criticism; reception aesthetics.
Further Reading:
R. Holub Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction (1984).
[9:02 AM, 12/28/2018]: implied reader
Wolfgang Iser's concept for the reader a literary work appears to be written for, or seems to
invite (as opposed to the actual reader of the work). The implied reader is assumed to be both
sympathetic and receptive to the text's strategies. By the same token, the implied reader—in
contrast to the actual reader—has no ideological ‘baggage’ that might interfere with the text's
schemes. The concept clearly owes a debt to Wayne Booth's prior concept of the implied
author and can be usefully compared to Stanley Fish's later notion of the interpretive
community.
Further Reading:

10. R. Holub Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction (1984).
[9:03 AM, 12/28/2018] : Marxist Criticism
A form of cultural criticismthat applies Marxist theory to the interpretation of cultural texts.
Since neither Karl Marx nor his collaborator Friedrich Engels ever developed a specific form of
cultural criticismthemselves, Marxist Criticismhas been extrapolated from their writings. As
there is no one form of Marxism, so there is no one form of Marxist Criticism. This is not to say
that the different variants of Marxist Criticismdo not have certain features in common, but it is
nevertheless also true that there is considerable debate within the field concerning those
differences. In common, then, all forms of Marxist Criticismassume the following:
(i) that no artistic object can be understood in isolation from the social, cultural, and historical
conditions in which it was produced;
(ii) that all categories by which artistic objects might be measured are themselves constructions
that need to be evaluated from the perspective of the social, cultural, and historical conditions
that gave rise to them;
(iii) that all artistic productions are commodities that can and must be understood in terms of
the production of surplus value;
(iv) that art is a site for the playing out of a symbolic form of class struggle.
The principle area of difference in Marxist Criticismis the issue of whether or not it should be
prescriptive or not: in other words, is it the job of Marxist Criticismto determine what art
should be like? There have been powerful movements in favour of this position—the most
noted is of course socialist realism. This position has also been championed very strongly by
such critics as György Lukács. But there is a similarly powerful movement against it and in
recent years it has generally been agreed that it is neither possible nor desirable to prescribe
what art should be like. But if that isn't the task of Marxist Criticism, then what is? As is the case
with psychoanalysis, the response to this question is twofold: there is an attempt to understand
the nature of the object (i.e. what makes it art and why) and alongside it there is the attempt to
understand the subject's response to particular art objects. In both cases, the primary
conceptual tool is the notion of ideology. Some of the major Marxist critics are: Terry Eagleton,
his Marxism and Literary Criticism(1976) was immensely influential; Fredric Jameson, his
Marxism and Form (1971), and more particularly The Political Unconscious (1981), are perhaps
the most sophisticated attempts to synthesize the critical methodologies from a broad
spectrum of approaches; Lukács, although a troubled figure, his History and Class
Consciousness (1923) continues to be studied today and it is in many ways a foundational text
for the field; Pierre Macherey, whose Pour une théorie de la production littéraire, translated as
A Theory of Literary Production (1978), is generally regarded as the definitive application of
Althusser's work to literature; and Raymond Williams, a hugely influential figure, particularly in
the nascent field of Cultural Studies.

11. [9:04 AM, 12/28/2018] : Cultural Studies
An interdisciplinary approach to the study and analysis of culture understood very broadly to
include not only specific texts, but also practices, and indeed ways of life. The most influential
works in the field have tended to be large edited collections like Lawrence Grossberg, Cary
Nelson, and Paula Treichler's mammoth Cultural Studies (1991) and introductory textbooks like
John Fiske's Reading the Popular (1989), which reflects not only the heterogeneous nature of
work calling itself Cultural Studies, but the fact that in a very real sense Cultural Studies is
theoretically provisional and avant-garde (its practitioners tend to be avid consumers of new
concepts drawn from a wide variety of fields).
Cultural Studies began in Britain in the late 1950s. Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1957)
is often held up as the inaugural text, with Raymond Williams's Culture and Society: 1780–1950
(1958) running a close second. Both these authors rejected the Leavisite model of practical
criticism, which was largely concerned with identifying works suitable for inclusion in a highly
select canon of ‘great works’, in favour of a more expansive view of culture. As Marxists they
were both concerned to point up the importance of traditional and working class culture and to
show how changes in society threatened their very existence. In contrast to practical criticism,
Cultural Studies employed history and sociology as well as ‘close reading’ in its analysis of
cultural texts. Cultural Studies achieved institutional status in 1964 when Hoggart founded the
Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS).
For the next decade or so the CCCS provided much of the focus for the developing field and
many of the most famous names in the field were based in Birmingham at this time. Stuart Hall
succeeded Hoggart as director and (arguably) gave Cultural Studies the shape it has today by
importing the then quite new and radical thinking coming out of France known as theory, e.g.
structuralism semiotics, and (later) poststructuralism and theories of power as well. Britain fell
into steep economic decline during the 1970s, falling so far as to require an IMF loan to staunch
its currency, which of course had widespread social repercussions. Cultural Studies was at its
peak documenting this, but when Thatcher came to power in 1979 it found it impossible to
account for the profound swing to the right that followed. Stuart Hall's magnificent Hard Road
to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (1988) is the last will and testament of this
species of left-sympathetic (when not avowedly Marxist) Cultural Studies.
In the 1980s Cultural Studies spread its wings and its focal point shifted to Australia, not least
because many of its pioneering practitioners like Tony Bennett, John Fiske, and John Hartley
migrated there. Cultural Studies flourished in Australia, becoming in two decades the dominant
discipline in the humanities, at least in part because of its facility for adaptation to the demands
of the so-called ‘r…
[9:04 AM, 12/28/2018] : gender
The set of behavioural, cultural, psychological, and social characteristics and practices
associated with masculinity and femininity. The notion of gender was used in Second Wave

12. feminism to separate individual attitudes and actions from physiology in order to undermine
the biological determinist thesis which holds that cultural attitudes are simply a reflection of
the specific nature of the body. By contrast, feminism claimed that attitudes are fluid with
respect to biological sex and that it is culture rather than nature which shapes these. As Simone
de Beauvoir famously put it, one is not born a woman. Gender is rather an identity one adopts
or creates. American ethnomethodologistHarold Garfinkel and American sociologist Erving
Goffman argue that gender identity is something that has to be learned and constantly
managed. Their work chimed well with American psychologist Robert Stoller who showed that
in the case of sex reassignment surgery it was a relatively simple procedure to correct the body,
but much more problematic to undo the learned social behaviour. It was further argued by
feminism that the very notion of gender is itself influenced and shaped by other equally
powerful cultural forces such as race and class, there being a significant difference in terms of
relative opportunities between being a white middle-class woman living in a western city and a
poor non-white woman. In recent times, work on gender has been dominated by Judith Butler,
who argues that the sex/gender distinction should be regarded as regulatory apparatus that
positions sex as ‘natural’ so as to make gender roles appear ‘normal’. Society, she argues, calls
upon us to perform masculinity and femininity and though it appears that we may choose
between the two, the crucial point is that we cannot choose not to have any gender at all. Thus
gender is a highly ambivalent category in Butler's view. As Donna Haraway points out in an
extended essay on the question of gender in Simians, Cyborgs and Women (1991), the
sex/gender distinction is also an artefact of the English language—German, for instance, uses
only one word, Geschlecht, to encompass both meanings, while not coinciding exactly with
either—and other cultures confront this issue in different ways, according to different social
and cultural pressures.
Further Reading:
C. Colebrook Gender (2004).
[9:05 AM, 12/28/2018]: feminist theory
The extension of feminism (understood as a practical social movement concerned to address
the inequality of the sexes) into theoretical discourse. Undoubtedly one of the most important
and influential intellectual currents of the 20th century (every bit the equal of Marxism and
psychoanalysis), Feminist theory encompasses most disciplines from art and architecture
through to science and technology, but it is predominantly concentrated in the social sciences
and the humanities. As diverse as it is, and the varieties of feminist theory are almost without
limit, at its core it has four principal concerns, which are to: (i) elucidate the origins and causes
of gender inequality; (ii) explain the operation and persistence of this state of affairs; (iii)
delineate effective strategies to either bring about full equality between the sexes or at least
ameliorate the effects of ongoing inequality; and (iv) imagine a world in which sexual inequality
no longer exists. Of the four, feminist theory has tended to prioritize the first two, leaving the
strategic questions to women working in the field, so to speak, in the various advocacy groups

13. like the National Organization for Women founded in the US in 1966; while the task of
imagining the future has been parcelled out to creative writers, particularly those working in SF
like Ursula LeGuin and Marge Piercy. The decision to prioritize one or other of these four
problematics is what gives shape to the specific feminisms.
The causes of sexual inequality are almost impossible to trace since for all of recorded history it
was already an established fact. Therefore it is ultimately a matter for pure speculation. The
most widely accepted hypothesis is that in prehistoric times biology placed women in a
subordinate position to men because pregnancy and childrearing render them vulnerable and
in need of assistance both to obtain food and fend off predators. While there is probably some
truth to this strand of the biological determinism hypothesis from an anthropological point of
view, the practical need to protect women does not explain the widespread denigration of
women and their socialization as lesser beings. By the same token, as societies became more
prosperous and their technology more sophisticated women's vulnerability diminished, but if
anything the positioning of them assubordinate seemed to harden. For obvious reasons, then,
the issue that has exercised feminist theorists the most is the one of persistence: why does
sexismcontinue after the principal justification for it has long since ceased to obtain?
There are three basic answers to this question: first, biology continues to be a determining
factor; second, that it is in men's interest to maintain the subordination of women; and third,
women have been complicit with their own oppression. Surprisingly, perhaps, radical feminists
like Shulamith Firestone supported the first answer, although she then used it as a stage to call
for the use of biotechnology to put an end to women's reproductive role. Not surpri…
[9:06 AM, 12/28/2018]: feminism
One of the most important social movements of the past two centuries and certainly the social
movement which has brought about the most enduring and progressive transformation of
human society on a global scale. It is customary to divide the history of feminism into a First,
Second, and Third Wave, with each period signalling a different era in the struggle to attain
equality between the sexes. Today feminism means many different things to different people,
but at its core, if one goes back to its origins in the late 18th century, it is primarily a social
movement for the emancipation of women. That movement was slow to start, and it wasn't
until the late 1880s that the term ‘feminism’ actually appeared. Before then, the more usual
term was ‘women's rights’. The first advocates for women's rights were for the most part lonely
voices pleading against obvious and manifest iniquities in society's treatment of women.
This was certainly the case in one of the earliest self-consciously feminist works, namely Mary
Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which was written at the height
of the French Revolution. Establishing what would become a common theme throughout much
feminist writing, Wollstonecraft conducts her critique on two fronts: on the one hand, she
criticizes patriarchal society (as it would later be called) for the unjust way it limits women's
rights, as well as their opportunity for education, self-expression, and economic independence;

14. while on the other hand, she criticizes women for buying into femininity which, in her view,
turns women into mere ‘spaniels’ and ‘toys’. Wollstonecraft's solution was better education for
young women, not the granting of equal rights. So in this sense, one might say feminism begins
not with Wollstonecraft but rather with the various Women's Suffrage movements that sprang
up in the early 1800s.
Achieving full voting rights for all women regardless of age, race, or marital status took more
than a century of struggle, easily justifying Juliet Mitchell's claimthat feminism is ‘the longest
revolution’. The focus on voting rights, as important as these are, tends to obscure the fact that
it was not only the right to vote that women were fighting for, though this was of course
emblematic inasmuch that once they could vote they would be able to use the democratic
process to bring about other forms of change. In point of fact, however, even after women
obtained the right to vote in most parts of the world at the turn of the 20th century, it was still
several decades before full equality was obtained. And many would say that it has not yet been
obtained.
It is worth mentioning that throughout the long First Wave of feminism women fought against
several other injustices as well, of which three are key. (i) Women were restricted in terms of
the ownership of property, requiring them to marry so as to inherit, thus preventing them from
attaining true independence (it is this issue which exercises proto-feminist writers like Jane
Austen and Charlotte Brontë). …
[9:06 AM, 12/28/2018] : First Wave feminism
The work of the first feminist activists in the early 1800s up to and including the Suffragists (as
retrospectively designated by the Second Wave feminists). These feminists laid the groundwork
for future feminists by fighting for the conditions that enabled them to go to university, vote,
and have economic independence. The First Wave feminists campaigned for both equal rights
in terms of laws and regulations, but also equal cultural rights, so as to give women the
opportunity to pursue whatever career or life choice they decided on.
[9:06 AM, 12/28/2018] : post-feminism
The position, variously argued, that feminism (specifically radical or so-called Second Wave
feminism) is no longer relevant in the present situation either because (in the affirmative case)
it has achieved its goals and has therefore reached its limit of usefulness, or (in the negative
case) it was wrongheaded to begin with and has been superseded by a more sophisticated
version. More of a sound bite than a fully thought-out concept, it is a fundamentally
conservative notion, much like Francis Fukuyama's notion of the ‘end of history’, in that it
wants to say both that the struggle for equality of the sexes is over and that the struggle was
unnecessarily shrill and aggressive to begin with. However, as many feminist commentators
have pointed out, the post-feminist position does not reflect the reality on the ground for the
majority of women in the world today, who continue to face gender bias in the workplace and
at home.

15. Further Reading:
S. Faludi Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women (1991).
[9:06 AM, 12/28/2018] : radical feminism
A loosely formed, but highly visible movement within feminism calling for a substantial change
to the structure of contemporary society (hence the designation ‘radical’), which originated in
the US in the 1960s with the Women's Liberation Movement. Radical feminismdoes not have a
single or unified theoretical or political doctrine, however it does take a consistent stance
towards men. Radical feminists identify patriarchy as the principal and universal cause of
women's oppression via its control of women's reproductive capacity, sexuality and—perhaps
most importantly, though much less obviously—via the ideology of femininity. Some radical
feminists, such as Shulamith Firestone, argued that it is precisely because of women's
reproductive capacity that they are vulnerable to subordination by men because pregnancy and
childrearing makes them dependent on men for support, at least in humanity's prehistorical
beginnings. Therefore control of reproduction via such means as the contraceptive pill is seen
as a crucial political step. Similarly the control of women's sexuality is resisted by redefining sex
in such a way that it is no longer seen in terms of satisfying male desires and needs (as
exemplified by pornography and prostitution). One solution, advocated by at least some radical
separatists, is to opt out of the heterosexual matrix altogether and adopt a lesbian lifestyle. The
more widely adopted solution, which was advocated by the likes of Germaine Greer, is for
women to set aside the restrictions of the cultural expectations of chastity until marriage and
self-denial within marriage and actively pursue their own pleasure needs. Many post-feminists
have in recent times written off this strategy as a pyrrhic victory at best, describing its
outcomes as melancholy sex without commitment or love. Probably the greatest changes,
though, have been made with regard to the ideology of femininity, which radical feminists
sought to overturn. Radical feminism, via the work of people like Mary Daly, has constructed a
women's epistemology, that is, a way of knowing the world from a woman-centric perspective.
[9:07 AM, 12/28/2018] : Second Wave feminism
A shorthand reference for the politically active form of feminism that emerged in the US and
elsewhere in the 1960s. It was neither a unified nor a homogeneous movement, but it did of
course have a common goal, however disparately this was conceived, namely the equality of
the sexes. It was born of the recognition that in spite of the considerable advances of the
retrospectively christened First Wave of feminism, women had still not achieved genuine
equality with men in every facet of life. Its starting point, in the US, was Betty Friedan's The
Feminine Mystique (1963), which argues that women are trapped in a systemthat denies them
self-identity as women and demands they find fulfilment through their husbands and children.
Later writers, particularly those identifying as radical feminists, would use the term patriarchy
as a shorthand for this systemic subordination of women at the level of culture itself, rather
than individual men.

16. In 1966, the National Organization for Women (NOW) was formed, as a civil rights organization
for women, and in many respects it became the driving force of Second Wave feminism,
particularly on the political front. NOW lobbied the US government to adopt the Equal Rights
Amendment (ERA), but while it had many victories at State level, it remained without ultimate
success at Federal level.
In 1970, a NOW committee member Kate Millett published her PhD dissertation Sexual Politics,
arguing that there is in effect a patriarchal and a non-patriarchal way of writing, with D. H.
Lawrence, Normal Mailer, and Henry Miller falling into the former category and Jean Genet into
the latter. The book sparked a huge debate and was attacked quite savagely by Norman Mailer ;
it is frequently held up as an example of what is wrong with political correctness. Nonetheless,
Millett's work offered an early and powerful critique of the patriarchal values in art and
literature. Australian critic Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch (1970) was published in the
same year, causing a similar stir by suggesting that the way to fight patriarchy is through
women taking charge of their own sexuality.
The extent to which sex is a neglected problem of violence and exploitation was brought to
light by Susan Brownmiller's angry exposé, Against Our Will (1975). Brownmiller's book divided
feminism into two separate and opposed camps: those like Greer who advocate sexual
promiscuity as a political weapon and those like Brownmiller who see this as simply catering to
a male-dominated view of desire. Second Wave feminism came to an end in the early 1980s. In
part, it was a victim of its own success because there was a powerful backlash against political
correctness, even among women, who found some of its messages ‘over the top’. But the far
bigger problem was the profoundly unfavourable political conditions that materialized in the
1980s: both Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK were anti-ERA in their
outlook and policy-making. Second Wave feminism has since been succeeded by Third Wave f…
[9:07 AM, 12/28/2018]: socialist feminism
A synthesis of radical feminism and Marxism (particularly its New Left inflection) that challenges
feminism's neglect of class and the Left's neglect of gender. Socialist feminismrejects radical
feminism's central claimthat patriarchy is the sole and universal source of the oppression of
women, just as it rejects Marxism's claimthat class and class struggle are the only determining
factors in understanding the present situation. Socialist feminism argues that class and gender
are mutually reinforcing systems of oppression (later critics of socialist feminismwould add the
reminder that race must also be taken into account). This is clear in the phrase ‘women's work’
which designates a type of work that only women can or should do and at the same time
justifies the lowly pay scale assigned to it. Socialist feminism does not share, therefore, Simone
de Beauvoir's foundational claimin Le Deuxième Sexe (1949), translated as The Second Sex
(1952), that the transition to socialismpredicted by historical materialism would in and of itself
free women from their subordination to men.
Further Reading:

17. J. Mitchell Women: The Longest Revolution (1984).
[9:07 AM, 12/28/2018] : Third Wave feminism
A movement for the renewal of feminism's original project—i.e. equality between the sexes—
expanded to incorporate those women, particularly women of colour, and women from the
Third World, who felt excluded from Second Wave feminism. Often conflated with so-called
post-feminism, although it is not the same thing at all, Third Wave feminism has its roots in the
disappointments and conflicts which brought the Second Wave to a halt. Writers like Gloria
Anzaldúa and bell hooks argued for a new conception of feminist subjectivity that took account
of race as well as class and gender. In the public sphere, feminism fought to retain the gains it
had made, in the face of an anti-equal rights onslaught by the Reagan and Thatcher
administrations in the US and UK respectively. The tipping point, so to speak, was the way Anita
Hill's allegations of sexual harassment against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas were
handled in 1991. In spite of Hill's testimony, Thomas was nonetheless confirmed as a Supreme
Court judge, sparking Rebecca Walker (daughter of Alice Walker, the author of The Colour
Purple (1982) to write a stirring riposte for Ms. magazine entitled ‘I am the Third Wave’ thus
giving the movement a name.
Further Reading:
S. Gillis, G. Howie, and R. Munford Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration (2007).
[9:08 AM, 12/28/2018]: écriture feminine
(feminine writing)
Hélène Cixous coined this term in the widely read essay ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’ (The Laugh of
Medusa) to describe a kind of writing that is outside of the masculine economy of patriarchal
discourse. Cixous envisages écriture feminine as a form of writing that would, in psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan's terms, reside or take place in the realm of the real, rather than the symbolic. In
psychoanalytic terms it therefore takes the form of the expression of the inexpressible and can
only be arrived at via experimentation and play. Interestingly, Cixous's canonical examples of
writers capable of attaining this effect are Shakespeare, Kleist, and Genet.
Further Reading:
V. Andermatt Conley Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine (1984).
I. Blyth and S. Sellers Hélène Cixous: Live Theory (2004).